Sunday, January 30, 2011

Next Recent Changes Camp in New Zealand

Greetings from the last day of of Recent Changes Camp 2011: Canberra at the University of Canberra. The last topic of conversation was were the next event would be and what would be the theme. Suggested was the topic of "research" in New Zealand in mid 2011. One possible area which will be interested is the NZ Ministry of Education and Webstock.

Also what was discussed was another event for Australia. The consensus was to stick with education themed events for Canberra and new themes elsewhere, such as art in conjunction with This is Not Art in Newcastle.

What struck me was that there were people from several nations in the room discussing the use of Wikis, when the subtext was differences in culture. Perhaps that should be made the explicit discussions of scope for different cultures online.

Also there was discussion of the next Wikimedia Australia conference proposed for Adelaide. This would have formal academic double blind reviewed papers. An interesting aspect of this is how the wiki ethos can be melded with formal academic publishing practices. As an example, it is usually a condition for submitting papers for a conference that they have not previously been published and can be blind reviewed, which could preclude preparation of the paper using a public wiki. It would be interesting to see how the traditional formal review process which is built into packages such as OJS could be combined with a Wiki.